Throughout the course of the day, you’ll hear, read and see lots of things which we can trigger ideas or thoughts. We assume that we’ll remember all these thoughts, but in reality, most ideas are gone within a few minutes of them first popping into your head. How many times have you had a profound thought in the shower or just before bed, to find that a few hours later, not only don’t you remember the idea, but you don’t even recall ever having had one – unless you have trained your memory of course.

There is a solution, it’s not new and it’s not radical but it is effective. Write everything down. It seems like this is a rookie piece of advice and to be honest it is. But if you write all your thoughts down, by the end of the day, you’ll be surprised at how many good ideas and thoughts go through your mind in a single day.

I recommend buying or choosing a dedicated notebook to take notes in. After all, who wouldn’t want to follow in the footsteps of one of our most renowned geniuses? Leonardo da Vinci was famous for keeping copious notes and his notebooks have been pored over by millions.

Keeping a notebook has multiple benefits:

You don’t lose any of your potentially great ideas

It allows you to create a database of information, giving your brain a bit of a rest

Writing an idea down actual makes you more likely to remember it as the brain

The alternatives are the many online tools and apps which offer notetaking functionality (Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep etc.) however, they don’t have the benefits of physically writing down. The act of writing focuses the brain on the information as you not only need to hold it in your short-term memory, but you need to convert the thought into physical action and then engage the language centre of your brain for that movement to produce something with meaning.

Don’t underestimate the power of keeping a notebook, the greatest minds in the world all did – why ignore a winning formula?